How would the west view a mordernizing Abyssnia?

Social Darwinism was a phenomenon of the post-US civil war era: I suspect that the decline in black status in America in the post-revolutionary era had more to do with Upton Sinclair's remark, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it " [1] - and there was an awful lot of money in slavery, especially after the cotton gin came in.

[1] And its inevitable corollary, "It is easy to get a man to believe the most outrageous shit, if his salary depends on his agreeing with it."
 

scholar

Banned
Social Darwinism was a phenomenon of the post-US civil war era: I suspect that the decline in black status in America in the post-revolutionary era had more to do with Upton Sinclair's remark, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it " [1] - and there was an awful lot of money in slavery, especially after the cotton gin came in.

[1] And its inevitable corollary, "It is easy to get a man to believe the most outrageous shit, if his salary depends on his agreeing with it."
I tend to use Social Darwinism even when it is not technically accurate. This is because what it represented was the explicit enumeration of a number of preexisting trends and ideas. Darwin's evolutionary principles were immediately co-opted because it justified previously untenable or contradictory (because of the humanists and the religious) ideas about the stratification of human beings.
 
Sure, things aggravated in the 19th century with the stupid rationalization but the seeds of modern racism were already there. Centuries of slavery screwed up the prestige of the Black population and in the minds of the folk the color of the skin became pegged with their dignity and ability to thrive. Once the whites get their social mobility and the blacks lag in that, you don't need a pseudo-scientist to come out with the following thought: "blacks are naturally low class therefore they must have less skills, too"
 
I tend to use Social Darwinism even when it is not technically accurate. This is because what it represented was the explicit enumeration of a number of preexisting trends and ideas. Darwin's evolutionary principles were immediately co-opted because it justified previously untenable or contradictory (because of the humanists and the religious) ideas about the stratification of human beings.

Not necessarily religious, really: there were plenty of God-botherers quite happy to go along with the notion of separate creations of different races or the Curse of Ham or The Great Chain of Being placing Blacks in a fundamentally inferior position.
 
Once the whites get their social mobility and the blacks lag in that, you don't need a pseudo-scientist to come out with the following thought: "blacks are naturally low class therefore they must have less skills, too"

I think you are getting cause and effect mixed up there: people didn't become racist because blacks lagged socially, blacks lagged socially because they lived in a racist society. :)
 

scholar

Banned
Not necessarily religious, really: there were plenty of God-botherers quite happy to go along with the notion of separate creations of different races or the Curse of Ham or The Great Chain of Being placing Blacks in a fundamentally inferior position.
Not necessarily, but majorly. The notion of separate creations was often met with considerable opposition within religious groups. It is also possible for humanists to only consider certain races to be fully human, while others have human like qualities but are not fundamentally and completely human.
 
Well I think the difference would be that the Abyssnians would have a role to play, how ever minor in the european system as blackfox5 has suggested. The Ottomans weren't white either.



I can see Abyssnia starting an imperial project in east africa. I'm not sure about this but I don't think oil had been discovered in Nigeria before independence. Please correct me if I'm wrong. America also didn't have any strategic interests in east africa or the indian ocean during the period under discussion.

The Ottomans were pretty much accepted as Europeans.
 
I think you are getting cause and effect mixed up there: people didn't become racist because blacks lagged socially, blacks lagged socially because they lived in a racist society. :)

I wasn't talking about how people became racist. I was talking about the racist thought that blacks were inherently less apt than whites. If the average black is indeed poor and uneducated, the primary conclusion is that blacks ought to be less apt...
 
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